Obituaries

Survivors include a daughter, Patricia "Bunny" Shannon-Hasse of Orlando; and a brother.

John M. VendittiCancer Researcher

John M. Venditti, 79, former chief of the drug evaluation branch of the National Cancer Institute, died of congestive heart failure Oct. 21 at his home in Bethesda.

For 26 years, Dr. Venditti, an expert on drug interactions, ran the NCI's drug evaluation branch, and for 20 of those years he was director of the NCI's anticancer drug screening program, a worldwide network of research and development projects. In 1983, he established the National Cooperative Drug Discovery Groups, a consortium of academic, industrial and governmental organizations, to mobilize top scientists in the fight against cancer.

Born in Baltimore, Dr. Venditti graduated from the University of Maryland and received a doctoral degree in pharmacology in 1965 from George Washington University's Medical Center for Biomedical Sciences.

He retired from NCI in 1987 after serving as U.S. delegate to the First International Conference on Anticancer Screening Methodology and to the Anticancer Screening Panel of the World Health Organization. He then worked in the private sector as vice president and director of research at Microbiotest Inc. of Sterling, senior associate at Technical Resources International Inc. of Rockville and senior scientist at SAIC-Frederick Inc., from which he retired about six months ago.

Dr. Venditti wrote more than 160 scientific publications and book chapters on cancer research and had been scientific editor of the journal "Cancer Chemotherapy Reports.

Survivors include his wife of 55 years, Nancy Venditti of Bethesda; three children, Nancy V. Gauss of Gunnison, Colo., the Rev. J. Michael Venditti of Allentown, Pa., and Mary Ruth Yao of Silver Spring; and three grandchildren.

Wilbur H. EskiteNOAA Senior Executive

Wilbur Henry Eskite, 78, a senior executive at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration who did planning work on the Landsat and Seasat satellite systems, died Oct. 27 at Frederick Memorial Hospital. He had lung cancer.

Mr. Eskite worked for NOAA and a predecessor agency in the Commerce Department from 1963 to 1987.

He was born in Gallup, N.M., and raised in Washington, where he graduated from McKinley Technical High School.

After serving with the Army military police in occupied post-World War II Japan, he graduated from George Washington University in 1953 with a bachelor's degree in civil engineering.

He spent seven years as a cartographer for Cartographics Inc. in Washington and worked for other businesses before joining the government.